A recent email discussion w/ @MikeThacker , @Dan-ODS and @bloom highlighted to me that we perhaps lack clarity on how we want to signpost and link to individual Profiles from the docs.openreferral.org site. I was wondering if the community had any takes on this?
At the moment we have the ORUK Profile active/released and I think we’re expecting a 211 profile to emerge sometime in the not-too-distant future. It’s reasonable to expect even more to emerge in various states of readiness as HSDS is adopted and adapted to local contexts.
How, and how prominently, should the docs.openreferral.org site signpost known Profiles? Either individually or collectively.
Currently — since the documentation review — there is a List of Known Profiles on the “Using Profiles” page in the Guidance section. Is this enough or should we be signposting individual Profiles in another way?
My take on this so far has been that the use-cases for signposting individual Profiles are limited to:
- introducing someone new to HSDS to a Profile that may be of use/interest to them.
- helping someone navigate to the (external) docs site of a Profile that they already know about by name.
This is because individual Profiles are pretty self-contained and are expected to host their own documentation for the most part. A user of a Profile should ideally have very little use of the docs.openreferral.org site in terms of reference material.
But we still need to support people discovering Profile documentation via the docs.openreferral.org site. There are a few ways I can think of that would make individual Profiles more prominent on the docs:
- A new section in the navbar called “HSDS Profiles” (or similar), where each link is an external link to that Profile’s documentation site.
- A new top-level page in the Guidance section which links to individual Profiles. The benefit of a new page is that it’s in the main navbar so people can spot it easily.
- Some copy on the landing page asking people “Are you looking for one of these HSDS Profiles?” with the links there.
There’s likely more things that I haven’t thought of! So the asks from this thread are:
- What do you feel the role of the docs.openreferral.org site is in relation to Profiles?
- How prominent should links to individual Profiles be on the docs.openreferral.org site?
- Where/how should the docs.openreferral.org site link to Profiles, given your answer to the above?